New Zine

March 2023 

19 years ago I started a project to get better at telling stories. My original goal was to make a short, fictional film every week. That was unrealistic — at least for me. What I learned right away was that if I was going to get a lot of practice, I had to improvise. So I started shooting everything around me and telling stories about what was happening in my life. I found a little group of people also doing this. We practiced and figured things out together. We invented vlogging and it became a whole thing. And it worked for me! I made a couple of hundred little films over a few years and I got a whole lot better at telling stories.

Then, for a decade or so, making any kind of art faded away. This coincided with my beginning to work at Mozilla. The part of my brain that designs software has a large overlap with the part that makes art and at the end of the day, I was out of creative energy. That was part of it for sure. Also, I guess my priorities had shifted.

But since my father died in 2021, I've had this compulsion to make art again — zines in particular. So to reclaim some of that energy, I changed my sleep schedule and began working on art early in the morning. That's been a big help. I created my zine Grey Matter Gravy and published four issues over the last two years. But now I find I want more practice. Grey Matter Gravy issues (and another zine I’m cooking up) are becoming bigger and more involved. I need something smaller. Something I can do more often. Something like telling stories about what's happening in my life.

And that’s how my email newsletter which was only supposed to say, "Hey I made something" became one of the things I make. I hope you enjoy it.

This zine is free and only available in print. If you'd like to start receiving it, sign up here.